In this interesting new book, Sujin Lee traces the discourse on the “population problem” in prewar Japan. Lee’s work joins recent English-language scholarship that has drawn important attention to the topics of population and birth control such as Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci’s Contraceptive Diplomacy and Aya Homei’s Science for Governing Japan’s Population. As Lee notes, issues of population haunt public discourse in contemporary Japan, where the birth rate has been below replacement level for several years. Lee’s text transports us to the prewar period, when social scientists and policy analysts demanded a solution to a different population problem. This was initially the problem of overpopulation, which seemed to threaten stability in prewar Japan. During the wartime period, concerns then arose over the need to increase population to support the war effort. Lee’s text thus brings attention to different dimensions of the problem in prewar Japan, ranging from early neo-Malthusian discourses of overpopulation, to feminist birth-control advocates, to wartime pronatalist discourses. Lee’s analysis productively incorporates Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics, where the state, public intellectuals, and other public discourses transformed population into a productive resource. Under biopolitical regimes, states enact power on life as an aggregate population rather than solely over the individual as a singular being. In the logic of biopolitics, public and governmental actors sought to improve both the quality and quantity of the population so that the Japanese could become useful resources for the development of the nation. As Lee argues, birth control became an important site for enacting the biopolitical management of the population in modern Japan. Lee consciously chose the chapters to highlight how population could become a discursive object that transcended specific policies or institutions. This text places special emphasis on how the bodies of women took on particular significance as sites where government policies and intellectual theories converged.
